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Truth, Fiction, and Nostalgia

I am unfashionably late to shamelessly self-promote some new prose that has come out earlier this month in Literary Orphans. As you will see in the table of contents, pieces are listed with approximate read times…so don’t be a dick and spend two fucking minutes reading something I humbly proffer two minutes of my writing to you, dear Reader, for entertainment, for ponderment, and for didacticism.

The appearance of fiction in truth and truth in fiction is as elusive as the elctron—physicists now know that the atom isn’t an organized ball-and-orbit construct, that electrons are not like planets circling their proton/nutron sun. Instead, electrons are vibrations that exist in proximity to the components of the nucleus and can exist anywhere at any time. Their position can only be defined, in a particular space at a particular time, by observation—so that the electron is only in the ‘one-o’clock position’ (for lack of a better term) only for the split second that you are observing it there. When you are not observing it, the electron can be at any other position, and is impossible to predict.

Truth and fiction have this same kind of quality. It is impossible to say whether something is truth or fiction, even if the storyteller insists on one or the other. Even the wildest science fiction stories are rooted in some fundamental truths we know about our lives, our society, or our physical universe. And even the truest of stories can be distorted by the nature of memory, or the perceptive filter through which humans perceive the world. What a wonderful paradigm.

All of this is to say that there is truth in my fiction, and I won’t spoil it for you, besides to say that I do indeed have a first generation digital camera. It is big and bulky and takes terrible photos. Worst part is that I can’t even transfer photos off of it because the chip is old technology and would require hardware I no longer have. There are photos trapped on that camera…photos of a special time and a special place, and special people who are there, pixelated on a one-inch screen.

The photos are trapped, but the memories are captured. It’s tragic and joyous at the same time, and damnit if it doesn’t so happen that every now and then when I’m alone and drunk I will pull out the camera, reload the AA batteries and flip through those photos. I am terribly nostalgic like that.